Hi! Is there any chance of seeing Sailfish 2.1 running in our beloved Onda V820W V3? This tablet port is the only real Sailfish tablet experience (despite the oficial Jolla Tablet) out there for who likes to ban Android away their lifes!

There have been a lot of cheap Chinese tablet using the same SoC, and usually they come with Android/Windows dualboot. So what's preventing us from running Sailfish OS on them? Android firmware can often be easily ported between such devices, but kernel is device-specific, so custom ROM makers just use the stock kernel from their device unmodified.

For Sailfish OS, we can't, since systemd requires some kernel options which are most of time turned off in Android kernels. Enabling them and recompiling kernel would be easy if Chinese manufacturers didn't violate GPL and actually provided kernel sources, but that's not the case. Thankfully, since most of hardware is similar, it's possible to base custom kernel on other device source.

I have Sailfish OS running on Onda V820w tablet. It's not perfect yet, but the hardware itself (touchscreen, audio, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, front and back cameras) works. Many thanks to Stskeeps for providing modules folders which were missing from Jolla Tablet kernel sources. The biggest problem was getting kernel working with camera sensors. Even though the needed drivers are present, PMIC regs and GPIO pin meanings turned out to be different. Just a few values to change, but it was very troublesome to debug and I had to disassemble Onda stock Android kernel to understand what's wrong.

Below is a guide to installing Sailfish OS on Onda V820w (tested with V3, see serial number to understand what revision is yours if you happen to have it). Hope community will be interested in running Sailfish OS on other similar devices and we can have more supported. I'm happy to help with what I can either here or at #sailfishos-porters on IRC.

I think the way it runs on ONDA is more hacky and complicated than it probably needs to be for Medion, if it's based on same device tree. Onda has 32-bit UEFI firmware and no kernel source code available from vendor, so basically I adapted Jolla Tablet kernel tree for it and used GRUB2 bootloader to boot 64-bit kernel with 32-bit UEFI (32-bit kernel can be also used in theory, but there is weird bug with kernel panic on starting PulseAudio).

Since Medion is Germany-based, can you request GPL kernel source code from them? It's either not present on their website or I couldn't find it.

I think the way it runs on ONDA is more hacky and complicated than it probably needs to be for Medion, if it's based on same device tree. Onda has 32-bit UEFI firmware and no kernel source code available from vendor, so basically I adapted Jolla Tablet kernel tree for it and used GRUB2 bootloader to boot 64-bit kernel with 32-bit UEFI (32-bit kernel can be also used in theory, but there is weird bug with kernel panic on starting PulseAudio).

Since Medion is Germany-based, can you request GPL kernel source code from them? It's either not present on their website or I couldn't find it.

Hello TheKit! Tell me, please, whether it is possible to port sailfishos on a tablet having a dual load. My tablet on an Intel Atom X3 C3230 processor (zenpad c7 z170cg). Can I use the firmware that you prepared for the Onda 830 without modification to be installed on my tablet?

Hello TheKit! Tell me, please, whether it is possible to port sailfishos on a tablet having a dual load. My tablet on an Intel Atom X3 C3230 processor (zenpad c7 z170cg). Can I use the firmware that you prepared for the Onda 830 without modification to be installed on my tablet?

I think the way it runs on ONDA is more hacky and complicated than it probably needs to be for Medion, if it's based on same device tree. Onda has 32-bit UEFI firmware and no kernel source code available from vendor, so basically I adapted Jolla Tablet kernel tree for it and used GRUB2 bootloader to boot 64-bit kernel with 32-bit UEFI (32-bit kernel can be also used in theory, but there is weird bug with kernel panic on starting PulseAudio).

Since Medion is Germany-based, can you request GPL kernel source code from them? It's either not present on their website or I couldn't find it.

Hello TheKit! Tell me, please, whether it is possible to port sailfishos on a tablet having a dual load. My tablet on an Intel Atom X3 C3230 processor (zenpad c7 z170cg). Can I use the firmware that you prepared for the Onda 830 without modification to be installed on my tablet?